The present invention is related generally to performing radar cross section (RCS) analysis of aircraft engine face components. Specifically, the present invention is related to a finite element based approach for the capturing of fine details of RCS patterns from large scale, complex engine face configurations.
The performance of a radar cross section (RCS) analysis on aircraft engine face components is a prohibitively difficult task due to the large amount of memory required to generate an appropriate electromagnetic description of the aircraft engine face components (problems) to be analyzed. The RCS analysis of aircraft engine face components usually requires special numerical and mathematical techniques to be developed to make the large problems practically solvable. These special numerical and mathematical techniques need to include appropriate handling of complex multi-layer design features, modeling of the entire axi-periodic structure of the aircraft engine face components and techniques for coupling a finite domain to an infinite domain. The coupling of the finite domain to the infinite domain is usually accomplished using an integral boundary element technique.
Numerous techniques for solving large-scale electromagnetic problems are in common use. These techniques include Method of Moments (an integral equation technique), finite element and finite difference techniques (differential techniques) and geometrical and physical theory of diffraction based techniques (asymptotic techniques). Attempts to use these traditional techniques to perform RCS analysis of aircraft engine face components have proven to be largely unsuccessful. The current techniques in use require large amounts of computer memory and computational time to generate results on simple models that do not correspond to actual devices or scenarios with an aircraft engine face. The current techniques are essentially unworkable once they are applied to actual devices and scenarios because of the extraordinary amount of memory and computational time that is required to model the spatial volume and resolve the complex material and geometric details of the device.
Therefore what is needed in the art is a technique that can accurately perform an RCS analysis on actual aircraft engine face components without requiring large and excessive amounts of computer memory and computational time.